The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

Friction, however, came less from political than military differences. The CNT had shown in its furious assaults on the rebel-held buildings in San Sebastián during the rising, in its burning of Irún when it was almost surrounded by the nationalists and later in its intention to lay waste to San Sebastián before Mola’s troops occupied it, that it wished to fight a war to the finish. The CNT stated openly its preference for dying in the ruins rather than submitting to Franquist rule. The Basques, in line with the character of a mountain people, were content simply to defend themselves when directly attacked. They even had their symbolic Maloto tree on the border marking the point beyond which their forces should never advance. The Basque nationalists made it clear from the beginning of the civil war that, apart from their anti-fascist feelings, they were on the side of the Republic because it promised them autonomy. They proudly proclaimed their Catholic faith and attacked the anti-clericalism in other parts of republican territory. Nevertheless, their resistance to the military rising was supported by the great majority of their priests in spite of the unqualified backing of the Vatican and the Spanish Church for General Franco.

The Basque nationalists also pretended that there were no class divisions in Euzkadi. This had been partly true of agriculture, where feudalism had been weak, but the seafaring side of Basque life, dominated by local shipping magnates, with international empires, was scarcely classless. And in the nineteenth century industrialization attracted cheap labour from Castile, Galicia and Asturias. It was from this non-Basque workforce that the memberships of the socialist UGT, the CNT and the Communist Party were largely recruited. Indigenous workers were represented by the STV, Solidarity of Basque Workers.

The left believed fervently that the nationalists must be defeated. The Basque nationalists, on the other hand, seemed to know in their hearts that the republicans would be defeated. It may be that they learned the idea of being good losers from the English. At any rate, they treated their prisoners extremely well, sending many to France for release in the hope that this might induce the enemy to be a good winner. The nationalists made no reciprocal gestures to this attempt at ‘humanizing the war’, as Manuel de Irujo, the Basque minister in the central government, called it. They merely stepped up their campaign of hate, using such self-contradictory phrases as ‘soviet-separatists’ to describe the Basques.

To have the Catholic Basques as enemies was an embarrassment to the nationalist crusade and Franco was later to attack ‘these Christian democrats, less Christian than democrat, who, infected by a destructive liberalism, did not manage to understand this sublime page of religious persecution in Spain which, with its thousands of martyrs, is the most glorious the Church has suffered’. The Archbishop of Burgos called Basque priests ‘the dross of the Spanish clergy, in the pay of the reds’. The professor of moral theology at Salamanca, having described ‘the armed rising against the Popular Front’ as ‘the most holy war in history’, said ‘all who positively oppose the national government in present circumstances, trying to weaken its strength or diminish its power or obstruct its role, should be considered as traitors to the fatherland, infidels to religion and criminals to humanity’.

Cardinal Archbishop Goma also accused the Basque clergy of taking part in the fighting. Even though most modern military chaplains carry sidearms to protect the wounded, it would appear that only a few, if any, Basque priests were given a pistol, and there is no evidence that they used them. The primate also chose to overlook the fanatical Carlist chaplains on his own side. Many of these requeté almoners, purple tassels hanging from their large red berets, were in the tradition of the ferocious nineteenth-century Carlist priest, Santa Cruz, who used to absolve his prisoners en masse before shooting them. It was the Navarrese Carlists who were chosen as the main instrument to reduce their Basque neighbours in the spring of 1937.